Revelation (The Protectors 7)

Men’s clothes.

Ronan leaned down and picked up a light blue piece of fabric that I realized had once been a shirt. But not an ordinary shirt – it was the top from a set of scrubs.

Ronan let out a deep breath.

We continued our examination of the room and found more sprays of blood near the door, along with a larger pool of blood by the closet. Blood was also smeared on the side of the dresser.

The clear evidence of a violent encounter had my insides drawing up tight. How many times had I seen this same scene? How many times had I stood just like I was now – completely and utterly helpless to do anything about it?

“Ronan,” I murmured as my eyes fell on something near the bed. I ignored the bloodstains on the mattress and stepped through the debris, grabbing a piece of clothing to pick up the frying pan that had caught my eye. Except it was no ordinary frying pan…it was a heavy cast iron skillet and there was dried blood along one edge of it.

Ronan studied it for a moment and frowned. “Let’s talk outside,” he said. I put the pan back down as we left the room. Ronan stopped in the living room long enough to close the curtain since we needed to leave the place exactly as we’d found it. On the way out the door, he used the edge of his jacket to wipe his prints from the doorknob.

Ronan’s phone rang before he could say anything as we started walking towards our cars. He listened for a few moments before saying, “Send the location to Cain’s phone.”

I tensed even as a flurry of excitement went through me. It had been a while since I’d seen any kind of real action on the job. The last time had been when I’d gone with Memphis to rough up some guys who’d threatened one of his lovers. But it had been Memphis’s show, so watching was pretty much all I’d gotten to do.

Ronan hung up the phone and tucked it into his pocket. His eyes settled on me. “You know I started back at the hospital a couple weeks ago, right?”

I nodded. I’d met Ronan Grisham a few years earlier when he’d offered me a role in his underground vigilante organization. He’d been heading the group at that time, but his recent marriage to a young man he’d known for years had had him rethinking his position as leader and he’d ultimately decided to return to his roots as a trauma surgeon. The newly minted family man who, along with his husband, had taken in three foster kids two months earlier had gone legit, though he still continued to finance the group. He’d handed the reins of the day to day operations over to Memphis.

“I was doing a shift in the ER night before last,” Ronan began. “There’d been a fifteen-car pile-up on the freeway that night and we were jammed. All hands-on deck kind of thing. One of the interns sent a patient to radiology without doing a proper exam. The patient ended up going into respiratory failure before they could even get him on the elevator.”

“Okay,” I said, though I had no clue why he was telling me all of this.

“The guy transporting him called a code and got him back to the ER. The intern who’d seen the patient panicked when he couldn’t tube the guy.”

At what I suspected was my confused look, Ronan clarified, “He couldn’t get a tube down the guy’s throat to help him breathe.”

I nodded.

“He needed to do a tracheostomy. That’s where you cut an incision into the windpipe and insert the tube that way.”

“Okay.”

“The intern froze. The nurse who was with him went to find another doctor, but we had three other codes going on at the time. There wasn’t anyone to do it.” Ronan paused. “By the time I got there after getting my own patient stabilized, the tracheostomy had been done and they’d gotten the guy’s vitals stable again. Problem was, it wasn’t the intern who performed the procedure.” Ronan held my gaze for a moment. “The nurse told me it was the transporter who did it.”

It took me a moment to understand what Ronan was saying. A transporter’s job was to move patients back and forth between departments – no way in hell that person would have been qualified to perform that kind of medical procedure.

“The transporter – his name was Allen – took off after they got the patient back. I found him in the locker room getting his stuff out of his locker. He tried to deny what he’d done...then he started apologizing. He began jamming his stuff into his bag and then he was gone. I couldn’t leave the ER to follow him…”